The drive-by vaccination camp will be extended from Kolkata Maidan to two other points in the city --- at Ajoynagar crossing service road from June 10 and the Traffic Training School of Kolkata Police at Tala Park from June 11. (File) With an aim to boost vaccination coverage among those who are still undecided on visiting hospitals to receive the jab, AMRI Hospitals launched a drive-by vaccination camp at Leslie Claudius Sarani (East Bengal Club approach road) in association with Kolkata Police on Wednesday.
City police commissioner Soumen Mitra flagged off the vaccination drive. Senior citizens living alone in the city, who registered for the jab through ‘Pronam’, an initiative by Kolkata Police, were administered vaccines along with functionaries of AMRI Hospitals.
“Since the launch of the community vaccination programme, we have noticed that a lot of people don’t want to visit hospitals to take vaccine shots for fear that they might catch the infection. As we are not allowed to start door-to-door vaccination, we have been exploring other ways to reach out to more people for the jab. When we mooted a drive-by camp to Kolkata Police, Commissioner Mitra supported the initiative enthusiastically,” Rupak Barua, Group CEO, AMRI Hospitals, said.
The drive-by vaccination camp will be extended from Kolkata Maidan to two other points in the city — at Ajoynagar crossing service road from June 10 and the Traffic Training School of Kolkata Police at Tala Park from June 11. The camps will be in place for at least a week and vaccines will be administered each day from 10am to 6pm.
On Wednesday, a total of 2,15,645 people were vaccinated across the state, taking the cumulative figure to 1,69,35,507, said health officials.
“In the special category for people aged between 18 to 45 years, 17,01,976 have been vaccinated overall since the drive began,” said DHS Dr. Ajoy Chakraborty. Also, the Sputnik V shots, which were recently shipped to Kolkata, marked its debut in the state’s inoculation drive on Tuesday as 150 people were administered the Russia-made vaccine at the RN Tagore International Institute.
Meanwhile, the state recorded 5,384 new Covid-19 cases and 95 deaths on Wednesday. The overall caseload in the state currently stands at 14,42,830. Also, over the last 24 hours 10, 512 people have been discharged taking the discharge rate to 97.83 percent.
On Wednesday, a total 64,633 samples were tested of which 11.6 percent of samples returned positive for Covid-19. As many as 98,592 patients are currently in home quarantine.
While Covid cases have been showing a declining trend over the last few days, North-24 Parganas continues to be the worst-affected district in the state. On Wednesday, it recorded 996 cases and 20 deaths followed by Kolkata with 547 cases and 17 deaths.
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